Peter Medawar

So he jokes that he's still, like, a third-year resident, and he's, like, an R60 or what- [laughs] whatever he would be.

Um, but, um, he, uh, became fascinated with transplant, with, you know, reading about the work of Peter Medawar, and became fascinated with tolerance and, you know, th-this idea of trying to make transplants work without immunosuppression, trying to trick the immune system into accepting, uh, foreign organs.

But at around the same time, he also got interested in xenotransplantation, and he was a believer that if you could demonstrate something in nature, even at the l- uh, uh, in a small animal, you could eventually make it work in humans.

And, um, that's why he thought transplant intolerance should work, because of Medawar's work in mice, and it's why he thought xeno could work, because of some mouse work where they were able to get mice to accept, um, you know, foreign organs, and he figured if it can be done in mouse, it can be done in humans.

In his autobiography, Burnett ultimately stated, "...I regard the development of the clonal selection theory of immunity as my most important scientific achievement." When a biologist considers a theory his main contribution to science, that says something.

Indeed, the clonal selection theory of immunity laid the foundations for understanding immunological memory and immunological tolerance, and it was for its discovery that Burnett shared a Nobel Prize in medicine with Peter Medawar in 1960 and eventually made the development of monoclonal antibodies possible.

Its organizing force in immunology was akin to what Mendeleev's periodic table did in chemistry, or what indeed Darwinian evolution did in biology as a whole.

To discern order in a dizzying complexity of nature is theoretical thinking at its finest.

In other words, what they've seen positively is that science is limited.

As Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize winner at Oxford, wrote, it's very easy to see that the natural sciences are limited in that they cannot answer the simple questions of a child.

Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of life? You have to turn to literature and philosophy, and I would add, and to theology and religion to learn about that.

Now that limitation, realizing it, is extremely important.

If, in addition to all that it implicitly delivers, belief also finally provides what it explicitly promises.

Paraphrasing a reflection made by Nobel Prize in Medicine, Peter Medawar, when condemning the idea that culturally rooted healing myths should be placed on the same epistemic plane as medical science, person with a toothache may prefer a treatment that actually eliminates the problem to a ritual of profound, poetic, social, and spiritual significance, which will do nothing to alleviate their suffering.

At dawn, hours after the end of the ceremony, when adrenaline is low and everything is quiet, it is the sufferer who continues to endure alone and in silence.

That was The Persistence of Error, Why Longevity Doesn't Equate to Veracity, written by Carlos Orsi, first published in June 2023, and read here by Ryan Saffer.

The breakthrough came largely from experiments during and after World War II.

British biologist Peter Medawar studied skin grafts, partly because severe burns suffered by wartime casualties created an urgent interest in skin transplantation.

Medawar demonstrated that graft rejection was not simply the result of poor surgery.

It was an immune response.